PHOTOS/POLL: Jurors in Gateway murder trial continue deliberations

BONITA SPRINGS - The first time Fred Cooper spoke with Lee County Sheriff's Office detectives, they told him over and over that things just didn't look good for him.

Cooper was in the middle of breaking up with his long-term girlfriend. His girlfriend had been having an affair with a married man. That man — along with his wife — had been found dead that morning, Dec. 27, 2005, and Cooper didn't have a strong alibi for where he was the night before.

They asked him: could he explain it all?

His answers are what jurors in the Gateway murder keep revisiting, judging by their request to hear a recording of those interviews for a third time Thursday evening.

Other than asking for extra paper and markers, this was the only request jurors made all day.

Otherwise, they worked steadily, but ended their third day of deliberations in this double murder case without a verdict. They will begin their work again this morning at 9, after spending a third night sequestered in a local hotel.

On the first tape jurors requested, they heard Cooper — who was under oath — saying he had already explained himself to detectives. He said he wasn't worried.

"I wasn't there," he said. "I wasn't there. I did not do this."

In an interview two days later — the second recording that jurors asked to have replayed for them — detectives asked Cooper many of the same questions: Had he ever been to Gateway? Did he know about his girlfriend's affair? Was he telling the truth?

Cooper had answered quickly.

"I am," he said. The tape ends with him repeating: "I didn't do this."

When Cooper, 30, took the stand in his own defense on the last day of testimony in the trial, though, he said much of what he told detectives in the first few days after Gateway couple Steven and Michelle Andrews were found dead had all been a lie.

The one constant in the version of events he gave detectives nearly three years ago and the version he gave jurors earlier this week: that he was not responsible for these deaths.

Steven Andrews, 28, was shot; Michelle Andrews, 28, was asphyxiated and beaten. Their toddler son wasn't physically harmed, but was left alone with the bodies.

Experts linked Cooper's DNA profile to DNA found on Michelle Andrew's nightgown and on her right hand fingernails. No other DNA evidence links him to the Andrewses' home, and Cooper testified that any DNA found on Michelle Andrews would have come from consensual sex he claims they had the night before she died.

Prosecutors in the case call Cooper's new story too "convenient." Cooper's defense described his lies as poor judgment, but far from proof of any guilt.

It is not clear whose version of events jurors believe.

Nor is it clear what jurors were looking for as they listened again to Cooper's early statements to detectives. This was the second day in a row that they have asked to listen to those interviews.

Jurors have spent more than 20 hours so far deliberating in this double murder case, and what goes on in the jury room is carefully kept out of public view. Even their notes are collected and secured at the end of each day.

They are kept together, two to a room, without television or telephones. The hotel, which was booked a few weeks ago, is sometimes used to house jurors in federal cases.

The county pays a total of $550 each night for their board, and a little less than that each evening for dinners to feed 14 — 12 jurors and two alternates. A bailiff guards access to their cell phones.

Sequestering a jury overnight for extended deliberations is extremely rare, and the judge in the case, Thomas Reese, couldn't recall when it last happened in a Lee County case.

It has been more than a decade, at least, said Lee County jury clerk Eileen Reynolds.

For the jurors in the Cooper case, Reynolds said it appears they are bearing the unusual circumstances well. That's judging by the fact she said that they still smile at her when she checks them in each morning.

"They don't seem to be worse for the wear," she said.

The sequestration, though, appears to have some residents recently called for jury service concerned. Since jury deliberations in Cooper's trial began, calls to jury clerks have included a spike in questions and worries about being asked to stay overnight, Reynolds said.

That shouldn't be a worry, she added.

As with other jurors with shorter-term assignments, jurors in the Cooper case are eligible for a stipend for their service.

Jurors who are retired, jurors who are self-employed and jurors whose employers do not pay them during jury service are eligible to receive $15 per day for their first three days of service.

Starting on the fourth day of jury service, jurors begin to receive $30 per day.

Jurors in this case have served 11 days so far, including two days of jury selection. They had last Thursday off as a holiday, and closing arguments in the case came Tuesday morning.

They have been deliberating since then.

There is no time limit on how long they can take.

The jurors are weighing six day's worth of testimony in the state's case against Cooper, who is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary.

If Cooper is convicted of those charges, he could face life in prison or the death penalty.

Any decision jurors reach must be unanimous, but if they decide they cannot reach a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial.